This chapter provides a detailed description of our research methodology. To the extent that limited research has been conducted on the early stages of L2 acquisition, as shown in Chapter 2, identifying appropriate tasks to elicit useful data was one of our foremost challenges. As this is a study of how L2 learners work on the linguistic input they receive, we were concerned not only with collecting data from the participants of the study, but also from the Polish instructor. In other words, we developed techniques to compare the performance of the learners in the TL with the quantity and quality of TL input received. Although we are limited in the amount of raw data we can include here due to space constraints, the original tests administered to our participants that are discussed in this book appear in the appendices. For more detailed information regarding the methodology of the study, consult Volume II of Rast (2003).

Participants

The primary data collection for this study was conducted at the Université Paris VIII in Saint-Denis, France, following a pilot study two years prior (cf. Rast, 1998). The learners were French native speakers who attended a specially designed Polish course, in which only students with absolutely no knowledge of the Polish language were permitted to enrol. Data were also collected from groups of native French speakers who did not participate in the Polish course and for whom one task in Polish represented their first exposure to the Polish language.

A total of 127 informants, constituting three distinct groups, participated in the study:

• French learners of Polish attending the Polish course (n = 19) – a subgroup of this group consisted of 8 monolingual French learners who attended all class sessions.